Today’s guest blog comes from Addison Cabot. Addison is a world traveller, virtual fitness instructor, and part-time writer. She is based in Atlanta, Georgia, but spends most of her time travelling through Europe and South America. Addison shares some health and wellness tips for the New Year with a particular focus on keeping well during the current pandemic.
The New Year is always a time when people give a little extra thought to health and wellness. Typically, this takes the form of resolutions. People enter the New Year determined to exercise a little more, eat a little better, cut out bad habits, and perhaps drop a few unwanted pounds. The transition to 2021, however, will come with a few unusual considerations. Following a year in which many all around the world found it much more difficult to focus on health and wellness, there may in fact be even more emphasis on these things in the year to come.
With that in mind, we have a few tips to offer for how to boost your health and wellness in the New Year.
Avoid the Gym Rush
One of the first things a lot of people tend to do when it comes to New Year’s fitness efforts is to sign up with local gyms. And this year, it’s easy to imagine quite a lot of advertisement coming from gyms looking to boost membership after 2020 devastated their business. With COVID-19 vaccinations now being distributed, it is time to imagine returning to public places like these local gyms in the near future. And those who own and operate the facilities can hardly be blamed for wanting to drum up excitement for when that time comes.
The thing is, we’re not there yet, and the public’s safety will depend very much on vaccination efficiency and how businesses handle sanitation. As a University of Chicago Medicine epidemiologist described in an article on this very subject, some may be safe, and some may not be safe. But it is not a “blanket statement” that all gyms are safe — at least not yet. So, while the desire to get back in the gym will be strong with many, our first tip is to avoid the gym rush for the good of your own health. Wait until things are really and truly safe, and in the meantime find other ways to exercise.
Make Activity a Priority
We just mentioned finding ways to exercise outside of the gym, and on top of that, we suggest making every effort to ensure that physical activity is a priority. In 2020, sudden exclusion from gyms and social gatherings, as well as disrupted routines, led many of us to drop our activity levels. Due to the “stuck at home” situation in which so many of us found ourselves, there didn’t seem to be opportunities to exercise. And even if there was, many just weren’t in the frame of mind to be particularly active. This is all understandable, but it’s also just the sort of thing you can look to turn around in the New Year.
Even if the flipping over of calendars to January 2021 is largely a symbolic gesture, it feels very much like a fresh start. Make a determination to prioritise physical activity starting in the New Year, even if it’s just a little bit on some days, your health and mental wellness will be better for it!
Take the Opportunity to Educate Yourself
Our final tip, and maybe the most important one, is to try what you might call a negativity detox. One of the simple, unfortunate facts about 2020 has been that it was impossible to escape negative feelings and numb emotions. Suggestions from a psychiatry professor at the University of British Columbia even went as far as to predict that for 10-15% of people, life won’t fully return to normal because of the damage that has been done regarding mental wellness. It’s a real problem, and one we haven’t fully grappled with yet.
For clinical issues or long-term effects, you should seek professional help, but more generally, our suggestion that ‘We Need a Break From All the Negative News’ — made back in August — is a decent motto to head into 2021 with. One of the best ways to address mental wellness in the New Year is to make a point of seeking out positive things in your life, or even in the world in general. Try immersing yourself in positivity, and remind yourself that things aren’t always so negative and worrisome as they were for so much of 2020.
Overall, health and wellness efforts in the New Year can take a lot of different forms. And in some ways, they should! The more dynamic your approach, the more likely you are to find reliable ways to stick to good habits and practices. Focusing on these tips though will help you to find good ways to exercise, learn what really makes a difference, and address your mental wellness as well. Those things together can make a very meaningful difference.
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Written exclusively for Lake Health and Wellbeing
by Addison Cabot
Everyone needs to read this! Thanks for sharing 🙂
You’re very welcome. We’re really glad you found this post to be informative.